Tortured Confessions, by Paul Wolf with Accompanying Articles, 9/24/03
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Tortured Confessions by Paul Wolf, 24 September 2003 Date: Wed, 24 Sep 2003 09:44:07 -0400 From: Paul Wolf <[email protected]> Subject: Tortured Confessions Introduction 1. September 11 plan was to hijack ten planes, says mastermind (9/24/03) 2. Confessions of a Terrorist (8/31/03) 3. The Guilty Men of 9/11 (9/10/03) 4. Nuclear-tipped Pakistan Remains a Powder Keg (9/22/03) Introduction The "confessions" of Abu Zubaydah and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, made under CIA interrogation, should be treated with skepticism rather than accepted at face value. While the circumstances of Mohammed’s interrogation are not known, according to book author Gerald Posner, Zubaydah’s confession was made under the alternating influcence of sodium pentathol and another unnamed drug, providing him with a rollercoaster-like experience during questioning. This technique was explored in depth in the CIA’s secret MKULTRA drug and torture experimentation program. Unfortunately, most of the records from the program were apparently destroyed. The 1963 CIA "Kubark" interrogation manual is available online , though. It provides some good background reading on theories of prisoner interrogation, if you can stomach it. Here is the pertinent section on the use of drugs during questioning: "Like other coercive media, drugs may affect the content of what an interrogatee divulges. Gottschalk notes that certain drugs "may give rise to psychotic manifestations such as hallucinations, illusions, delusions, or disorientation", so that "the verbal material obtained cannot always be considered valid." For this reason drugs (and the other aids discussed in this section) should not be used persistently to facilitate the interrogative debriefing that follows capitulation. Their function is to cause capitulation, to aid in the shift from resistance to cooperation. Once this shift has been accomplished, coercive techniques should be abandoned both for moral reasons and because they are unnecessary and even counter-productive." I’m disappointed that the confessions were leaked to publicly discredit these individuals. It’s an old technique, often used by the FBI when the evidence they have doesn’t stand up in court. Their goal in doing this is extra-legal punishment of the individuals. Another goal in this case is obviously to try to put the 9/11 matter to rest -- any explanation will do. Just ask Mr. Hatfill, widely believed to have been responsible for the anthrax mailings which followed shortly after 9/11. He was never charged with a crime. The same thing happened with the bombing at the Olympics in Atlanta a decade ago, and in many other high profile cases over the years. A further goal is to implicate the Saudi and Pakistani governments in the 9/11 attacks. In 1936 the U.S. Supreme Court set the standard for the admissibility of confessions in court, in Brown v. Mississippi, 297 US 278. In Brown, the defendants were whipped with a leather strap with buckles until they agreed to confess. Then the defendants were forced to memorize detailed confessions provided by their interrogators, and whipped until they could repeat the confessions perfectly. The Supreme Court held that this method violated the defendants’ due process rights under the 14th Amendment and that "voluntariness" was an essential element of a confession. However one feels about the use of torture or drugs in interrogation to protect public safety, these are not "confessions" in any sense. One should take into account that the defendants had probably not slept in weeks, and may have been tied to chairs, with serums pumping into each arm, perhaps even screaming in pain at the time the statements were made. Without knowing the circumstances of the "confessions" it’s hard to say whether they were coerced. But the reference to the use of drugs during interrogation implies that no holds were barred. - Paul September 11 plan was to hijack ten planes, says mastermind By Katherine Butler, The Independent, September 24, 2003 The original plan for the September 11 attacks involved up to 10 planes and targets on the American west coast, the al-Qa’ida mastermind of the atrocities, has told interrogators. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed who was seized in Pakistan in March and is being held by the CIA at a secret location, said he first broached the hijack plot with Osama bin Laden in 1996. Interrogation records obtained by the Associated Press show the plan was to hijack five commercial jets on both US coasts but that was considered impractical by bin Laden. An early version of the plot also envisaged blowing up 12 western aircraft simultaneously over Asia in a second wave of attacks which would be done by groups allied to al-Qa’ida in South-East Asia. Mohammed’s statements also indicate Al-Qa’ida is planning fresh attacks on western targets. Until the confessions, investigators had assumed the ringleader of the 19 men who committed the 11 September attacks was the Egyptian, Mohammed Atta. But two of the hijackers on the plane that crashed into the Pentagon were more pivotal to the plot, the interrogation records suggest. Mohammed said Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi were among the four original operatives bin Laden assigned to him. Yemenis Walid Muhammed bin Attash and Abu Bara al-Yemeni were the others named. Mohammed’s statements claim he communicated with the ringleaders in internet chat rooms while they lived in the US preparing for the atrocities. Originally, hijackers were to be picked from different countries on the al-Qa’ida recruiting list, Mohammed’s answers reveal. But as the plan advanced, bin Laden decreed the hijackers would be composed of a large group of young Saudis. Copyright © 2003 The Independent Confessions of a Terrorist By Johanna McGeary, Time Magazine, August 31, 2003 Author Gerald Posner claims an al-Qaeda leader made explosive allegations while under interrogation By March 2002, the terrorist called Abu Zubaydah was one of the most wanted men on earth. A leading member of Osama bin Laden’s brain trust, he is thought to have been in operational control of al-Qaeda’s millennium bomb plots as well as the attack on the U.S.S. Cole in October 2000. After the spectacular success of the airliner assaults on the U.S. on Sept. 11, 2001, he continued to devise terrorist plans. Seventeen months ago, the U.S. finally grabbed Zubaydah in Pakistan and has kept him locked up in a secret location ever since. His name has probably faded from most memories. It’s about to get back in the news. A new book by Gerald Posner says Zubaydah has made startling revelations about secret connections linking Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and bin Laden. Details of that terrorism triangle form the explosive final chapter in Posner’s examination of who did what wrong before Sept. 11. Most of his new book, Why America Slept (Random House), is a lean, lucid retelling of how the CIA, FBI and U.S. leaders missed a decade’s worth of clues and opportunities that if heeded, Posner argues, might have forestalled the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Posner is an old hand at revisiting conspiracy theories. He wrote controversial assessments dismissing those surrounding the J.F.K. and Martin Luther King Jr. assassinations. And the Berkeley-educated lawyer is adept at marshaling an unwieldy mass of information-most of his sources are other books and news stories-into a pattern made tidy and linear by hindsight. His indictment of U.S. intelligence and law-enforcement agencies covers well-trodden ground, though sometimes the might-have-beens and could-have-seens are stretched thin. The stuff that is going to spark hot debate is Chapter 19, an account-based on Zubaydah’s claims as told to Posner by "two government sources" who are unnamed but "in a position to know" -- of what two countries allied to the U.S. did to build up al-Qaeda and what they knew before that September day. Zubaydah’s capture and interrogation, told in a gripping narrative that reads like a techno-thriller, did not just take down one of al-Qaeda’s most wanted operatives but also unexpectedly provided what one U.S. investigator told Posner was "the Rosetta stone of 9/11 ... the details of what (Zubaydah) claimed was his ’work’ for senior Saudi and Pakistani officials." The tale begins at 2 a.m. on March 28, 2002, when U.S. surveillance pinpointed Zubaydah in a two-story safe house in Pakistan. Commandos rousted out 62 suspects, one of whom was seriously wounded while trying to flee. A Pakistani intelligence officer and hastily made voiceprints quickly identified the injured man as Zubaydah. Posner elaborates in startling detail how U.S. interrogators used drugs -- an unnamed "quick-on, quick-off" painkiller and Sodium Pentothal, the old movie truth serum -- in a chemical version of reward and punishment to make Zubaydah talk. When questioning stalled, according to Posner, cia men flew Zubaydah to an Afghan complex fitted out as a fake Saudi jail chamber, where "two Arab-Americans, now with Special Forces," pretending to be Saudi inquisitors, used drugs and threats to scare him into more confessions. Yet when Zubaydah was confronted by the false Saudis, writes Posner, "his reaction was not fear, but utter relief." Happy to see them, he reeled off telephone numbers for a senior member of the royal family who would, said Zubaydah, "tell you what to do." The man at the other end would be Prince Ahmed bin Salman bin Abdul Aziz, a Westernized nephew of King Fahd’s and a publisher better known as a racehorse owner. His horse War Emblem won the Kentucky Derby in 2002.